Verizon still telling copper customers to upgrade or lose service

This site may earn affiliate commissions from the links on this page. Terms of use.

The FCC may have signaled its newfound willingness to take ISPs to task for poor service, but Verizon has yet to get the message. The company is back in the news for mistreating customers this week — this time for telling one Virginia man that it wouldn’t fix a line outage and that he had to upgrade to fiber. The outage cleared up on its own a few days later, but when the man called back, Verizon doubled down. Not only was he still required to switch to fiber by July 3, the company would disconnect his copper connection no matter what on that date.

Ars Technica has the details on the story, which seems to have become par for the course for the telco. Verizon has been pushing its customers towards fiber for over a year, typically by refusing to fix outages or problems with existing copper infrastructure, firing the employees that know how to maintain the lines, and then claiming that excessive problems with its POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) network makes it impossible to justify fixing the problems.

Why copper service still matters

At first glance, this might seem a non-issue, since fiber lines generally offer superior performance to old copper. If you live in rural areas or places where the electric service is erratic, however, those copper lines can be a godsend. Phones that run on copper can continue functioning, even in a power outage, because the copper line itself provides the small amount of power that the phone needs to function. That’s a feature that fiber can’t match — and Verizon only offers battery packs that are good for just eight hours (24 hour batteries are apparently available in at least some locations).

Losing phone service for a few hours is merely annoying, but phone service in the wake of a widespread power outage can be absolutely critical. User reports of downed lines or blown transformers are important to the power company, while elderly or infirm adults may depend on the ability to reach loved ones. Copper phone lines are often buried, which means they remain reliable even in situations where main electricity and cellular networks have gone offline.

For most of us, the difference between fiber and copper is largely irrelevant, but there are customers for whom copper is a clearly superior choice. Why, then, is Verizon trying to gut the service? Because POTS lines are subject to extensive regulation and service guarantees, while fiber isn’t. Switching customers to VOIP allows Verizon to dodge service requirements and uptime guarantees — and while Verizon states that it’s not charging customers more for the shift to fiber, there’s nothing preventing the company from raising rates after the transition away from copper is complete. Customers who have their copper yanked out are also more likely to be locked to Verizon as a provider — once the copper wire is pulled from a home, rewiring it is prohibitively expensive.

This complaint is just the latest in a long line of actions against Verizon. The company has been caught lying about data and bandwidth limits related to FiOS, using undeletable supercookies (it finally agreed to stop doing this after consumer outcry) and completely abdicated a promise it made in Pennsylvania to deliver high-speed fiber access to the entire state in exchange for being allowed to charge higher rates for its service. The company has been sued by its own unions for failing to maintain its copper networks and has slowed its fiber rollouts in most cases. FiOS hasn’t been brought to new cities in years, though the company does still expand its coverage area in cities where it had an established footprint.

The FCC has not yet decided how it will handle the transition to VOIP or whether telcos and ISPs will be permitted to shut down their copper networks. At present, such a move would leave millions of Americans without any type of phone service, unless you count extremely expensive wireless plans with per-GB rates of $10 or more. Needless to say, Verizon is at the forefront of insisting that such wireless access should be considered equivalent to wireline, even though the data rates for the former are an order of magnitude higher than what you’d pay for basic service.

Tagged In

This site may earn affiliate commissions from the links on this page. Terms of use.

ExtremeTech Newsletter

Subscribe Today to get the latest ExtremeTech news delivered right to your inbox.

Email

This newsletter may contain advertising, deals, or affiliate links. Subscribing to a newsletter indicates your consent to our
Terms of Use and
Privacy Policy. You may unsubscribe from the newsletter at any time.